Question: How can you say that thoughts aren't part of the brain?

Question: A neurosurgeon applied electric currents to the brain’s surface. Probing some areas would trigger whole memory sequences—even a familiar song that sounded so clear the patient thought it was being played in the operating room. So it seems that the memory is physical, yet you say thoughts even about physical things are nonphysical. If memory is part of the brain, then I can’t see why thoughts, too, can’t be part of the brain. If memory is nonphysical and has a physical source, then why can’t thoughts have a physical source, too (i.e., the brain)?

Response: First of all, even the memory of a physical event must result from its having been observed by a nonphysical intelligence (i.e., the spirit within us), or there would be no memory imprinted upon the brain, which in itself neither observes, thinks, nor understands. Memory involves thought, and thoughts are clearly not physical because they include nonphysical ideas such as truth, justice, perfection, etc. Amazingly, however, because of the mysterious connection of the mind to the brain, what the mind thinks is recorded upon the brain.

Obviously, no event of itself creates memories. Neither is the mechanism by which a memory is recorded the source of the event, nor is it the source of the memory of the event. Thus the brain is no more the source of memories physically stored on it than a video or a DVD, a CD, or a computer is the source of the sights and sounds physically stored on it.

Dr. Wilder Penfield described the brain as “a computer programmed by something independent of itself, the mind.” That a computer (or the brain) can have “memories” of ideas or events implanted on its physical structure does not mean that the computer (or brain) originated such ideas or events. Just as an intelligence that exists outside and is independent of the computer must put into it whatever “memory” it has, so it is the mind (the independent intelligence) that imprints memories on the brain.

Simple logic tells you that if thoughts originate with the brain, then the person living in that body is not doing the thinking but is at the mercy of the brain—and who will monitor the brain to see whether its thoughts are accurate? The physical brain serves many essential functions, but in all of them it is either directed by the mind or operates as an integrated part of autonomic body systems. The brain itself is not an intelligence. The fact that memories are physically recorded in certain parts of the brain and can be awakened by an electrical stimulus of such areas does not say that the brain either originated or even knows the significance of these memories. In the case of an event that was observed, both the awareness of the event and comprehension of its relevance requires a nonphysical mind. A memory has no existence without a mind to recognize and give it meaning.